Monthly Archives: January 2009

Do you use a JavaScript library — such as jQuery, Prototype, or MooTools — on one (or more) of your websites? That probably adds a good 18-120 kilobytes to your pages’ total size, adding more time to users’ download time.

Now, how many websites use that same framework? How many websites make use of jQuery, or example? A lot. That means any given user could be downloading the JavaScript files multiple times in a day, as different sites require it. What a waste of time and bandwidth.

Google has an interesting solution. They host multiple versions of several major JavaScript libraries on their servers for web developers to take advantage of. This offers several advantages. Their servers are quick and have wide pipes allowing for very fast downloads, for one. The real benefit is caching.

If a user visits several sites that reference jQuery (or another library) from Google, their browser caches the file and will only load it once, reusing the cached file on the other sites when they are loaded. This is because you’re referencing a file from ajax.googleapis.com instead of your own domain, and if multiple sites reference it, the browser remembers it already downloaded the file and uses the local copy.

When you’re putting together the design for a website, or something of that sort, it’s often helpful to put “dummy text” where content would eventually go. This allows you to get a better picture of what it will look like when you finish. The…

NETTUTS has put together a great video tutorial on the 960gs CSS grid framework, something I have been experimenting with lately. A Detailed Look at the 960 CSS Framework CSS frameworks are bloated. CSS frameworks are for people who don’t know how to code.…

Back in mid December I asked whether those of you who ran WordPress whether they had upgraded to version 2.7. The results are in, if a bit late. I have determined, with the help of our informal survey, as well as from monitoring other…

HTML isn’t exactly easy for ordinary people to comprehend and use correctly, and allowing it’s use in web forms then entails measures to be taken to prevent malicious code from being inserted. The infamous John Gruber came up with Markdown, with the help of…

Thaya Kareeson, maker of the useful WP Greet Box Plugin, has just released Anti-AdBlock, a WordPress plugin that detects if the user is running the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox and displays a message “humbly asking them to support your website by turning off…

A bill called the “Orphan Works Act” is pending in Congress. If approved, the bill would adversely affect U.S. copyright law, and cause major problems for individuals. Currently, in the United States, a creative work such as a blog post, web design, podcast, video,…

The web has been abuzz lately about CSS frameworks, such as 960gs and Blueprint. There have been tutorials springing up right and left, and articles discussing the merits and problems with them. What is a CSS framework? Wikipedia defines it as: A CSS framework…

Smashing Magazine has released an interesting WordPress plugin called “Twittar.” The plugin, named for “Twitter Avatar,” is used in place of WordPress’s Gravatar template tag. When a comment is displayed, the plugin will check to see if the email address left matches a Twitter…